Our story
This is Topolino.
15 years ago my girlfriend's cat disappeared.
We searched for weeks but we never found him.
I started looking for a GPS cat tracker. I thought, "There's gotta be something out there that actually works."
Turns out, there wasn't.
Every "cat tracker" I found was just a dog tracker in disguise. Too big. Too heavy. Battery died in a day or two. (This is still true today).
So I did what any reasonable person would do.
I decided to build my own. 😅
The next five years felt like an eternity.
At first, my goal wasn't ambitious. I just wanted to make a tracker actually suitable for cats:
- Small and light enough for a cat
- Battery that lasted at least several days
I raised money via investors and launched a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2016.
Within a few months we had hundreds of pre-orders.
But the real work had only just begun.
As we were finalising our prototypes, we realised something important.
GPS wasn't as reliable as we thought. Trees, buildings, obstacles caused gaps in tracking.
And worse, GPS stops working completely indoors. Walls block the signal entirely. 🤷
This wasn't a small flaw.
But we found a solution - Radio Technology. Radio waves penetrate walls where GPS cannot.
We just had to combine the two for the perfect recovery system.
Every manufacturer said the same thing: "That's not possible" ❌
The technology we needed didn’t exist off the shelf. So we decided to build our own manufacturing process in Switzerland.
We gathered experts across different fields and went through countless prototypes.
In 2019 we finally launched petTracer!
✅ GPS + Radio Technology.
✅ 34 grams.
✅ up to 30-day battery.
The response was immediate. Cat owners who had tried everything else finally had something built specifically for cats.
In 2020, we appeared on Germany's Dragon’s Den - Die Höhle der Löwen.
We sold out month after month.
And the most important part, the recovery stories started coming in:
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"Found my cat locked in a neighbour's garage. Radio mode led me right to him."
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"My cat had fallen into a canal and spent the night on a ledge. Thanks to petTracer I was able to rescue him quickly."
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"After three attempts, I finally convinced someone my cat was in their house. He'd been locked in a bedroom all night without making a sound."
Today over 10,000+ cat owners across the world trust petTracer 😻
petTracer has offices in Switzerland and the UK. Every member of our team is trained to provide fast, personal, expert support.
The best recovery system. The best support team.
That's why we built petTracer.
Alan Ellenberger - Founder
Photo taken at IOT Switzerland conference.
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